Chapter 2
2
ME? A SWAN?
The person staring back at me in the rear-view mirror is not someone I recognise. Well, that’s not exactly true of course. I know it’s me. I haven’t had some sort of catastrophic brain incident on the drive over here. It’s just not the me I used to be or want to be, or the me I’d thought I’d be when I was finally all grown up.
The woman looking back at me is clearly old, tired, dehydrated and existing at the tail end of her very last nerve. She needs her greying roots done and could probably benefit from some Botox. She definitely could do with an eyebrow wax and maybe a personal shopper. A facial wouldn’t go amiss either. What sick-minded creator of all that is human decided to throw adult acne into the menopausal mixing pot? I thought my days of applying seventeen layers of concealer over a spot that seems to emit its own radioactive glow were long gone. But no. I thought a time would come in my life where I emerged a beautiful swan after leaving aside the ugly duckling years, but it turns out there was no swan hidden inside of me, just waiting to glide majestically across life’s pond. I have jumped from ugly duckling to dumpy old bird.
There is nothing chic or MILF-esque about the rather haggard figure in her well-worn slogan hoodie (‘Tired my finger traces the curves and swirls of his penmanship. ‘R’s Childhood Memories’ – as if a box could hold all those moments in one place ready for us to dip into whenever we wanted. If only.
If only time didn’t steal so many of our memories or push them aside to make way for the flashier kind. The older I get the more I realise it’s not really the big nights out, and the huge celebratory moments I long to recall with the most detail. Given the chance, those are not the days I would relive. It’s the gentle, quiet moments I want. Like reading – just existing quietly – in the same room as my father, the sun streaming through the window, dust motes dancing in the air. Warmth, contentment, the rhythmic turn of pages. I wish I could remember what books we read. What we talked about between chapters. I wish I could remember what biscuits I gave him with his cups of tea.
I want those middle-of-the-night moments with my babies back, when the whole house was asleep but us. When I rocked them, feeling the softness of their downy hair against my shoulder, smelling the sweet, milky aroma of their baby breath. Oh, I would relive those moments in a heartbeat. I’d sacrifice a decade of whatever time I have left on this planet to relive just five of those quiet minutes.
A loud crash reverberates through the house, hauling me by the throat back from my internal time travel to the here and now, and my mother’s voice as she shouts, ‘Rebecca! Is that you! Can you come and help me here, love? I’ve got myself into a bit of a mess!’
It sounds very much as if her voice is coming from the small box room at the back of the house – my brother Ruairi’s childhood bedroom which he remains bitter about to this very day. My parents were ‘playing favourites’ when they assigned the much bigger middle room to me, he says. I tell him he’s talking absolute nonsense, but secretly I agree with him. I was a goody two-shoes. Ruairi was a wee shite.
‘Mum?’ I call, the relief that flooded my heart at hearing her voice already replaced by a sense of impending doom at just what this stubborn old goat has done to herself now.
‘I’m in your brother’s room!’ she calls.
I’m already walking through the door to the smallest bedroom in Ireland, North or South, when she adds, ‘Well, sort of, anyway.’
At first I don’t see her, which, given the size of the room, is quite impressive. But I do see a battered cardboard box on the floor – which I’m going to assume is what made the godawful crashing sound – and a step-ladder. When I focus on the ladder and my eyes cast upwards, it’s hard to miss the slippered feet dangling out of the hatch to the loft.
‘Jesus Christ, Mum! What are you doing? How did you get up there? Have you a death wish on you? Christ alive, you could break a hip, or your leg, or take a funny spell and fall out of that damn thing and break your neck and then where would you be?’
‘Well, love,’ my mother calls from the cavern of darkness that is our loft. ‘I imagine I’d be dead on the floor, but I’m not, I’m just a bit stuck. I dropped my torch, and my eyes are struggling to readjust to the light in the room so I can’t really see the outline of the ladder and…’
‘I was calling you!’ I scold, in a voice I’ve only ever used before on my children when they disappeared in a busy supermarket and I immediately assumed they’d been kidnapped, only to find them hitting up strangers for pound coins to go on the Balamory bus ride. A mixture of relief and anger bubble forth from inside me. ‘I thought you were dead!’ I manage with a squeak.
‘No,’ my mother says, without a hint of acknowledgement of the mental trauma she has just put me through. ‘I’d never die and leave the house in this state! I’d be mortified if the neighbours turned up to the wake to find my box room in disarray.’
‘But I…’ I try to find the words to tell her just how completely batshit crazy she is, but of course she interrupts me.
‘“But I” nothing,’ she says. ‘Help me get down and then we can talk about you taking the name of our Lord your God in vain in front of your elderly mother.’